Look Outside This House

Foundation Chamar had the pleasure to working with curator Sudarshan Shetty on his project “Look Outside of This House” that was presented at the 2019 Serendipity Arts Festival. The projects looks at the social worlds behind artisanal objects. The exhibition was an opportunity for Foundation Chamar to engage wider publics in Goa about the tools and techniques used in leather work. We invite you to view images taken from the exhibition and read the short essay prepared by Shetty.

Curatorial Note

What is the relationship between maker and object, between making and the categories of people and things? The relationship between people, things, and the social properties that emerge from that relationship is a well-trodden field in philosophy and anthropology. Through their idea of homo faber, Roman philosophers declared an understanding of humanness intimately connected to acts of fabrication that put us in control of our environment and through this, in charge of our destiny. Beyond the homo faber idea, certain recent schools of thought focus on making as a process of revealing embedded forms and liken the activity of makers to interventions within the force fields that swirl around us, affording no primacy to either the maker or the object.

Yet the process of making itself continues to remain mysterious, and stepping aside from this discussion about recognition and from theories about objects and things, I wonder about the obscure origins of the act of making itself. Action is an inevitable consequence of being in the world. But what happens in contexts where such production is at once theatrical and responds to what we may perceive as a “real need”? There are whole categories of objects that address social needs and are derived from older, artisanal forms of making, which have survived the onrush of commodification. The practices and objects gathered together for this edition of Serendipity Arts Festival share these qualities in common—of addressing “real” conditions and social needs by shaping materials at hand to perform at a local scale. What does it mean to give them the aura of a “work-of-art” through this curatorial act?

As a part of “Look Outside This House,” the Serendipity Arts Festival produced a short video about the work of Chamar Studios that you can watch below.